Wednesday, July 5, 2017

For the Second Time in Russian History, ‘The Fish is Rotting from the Head,’ Eidman Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, July 5 – “A fish begins to
rot from the head,” Russians say, “and society descends into insanity following
its dictator. His personal paranoia become that of society and propaganda
infects the entire country with it,” Igor Eidman says. “Thus it was in Stalin’s
USSR; such it has occurred in Putin’s Russia as well.”

Putin’s paranoia in contrast is
“directed abroad.” He believes that the West and “above all the US” wants to
overthrow and destroy him.” Indeed, he appears to view himself as a Russian
bear “which the West and the US ‘never will leave in piece” but will always try
to seek out and destroy.

As a result, “Putin views any world
event, be it the revolution in Ukraine or the elections in France through the
prism of this paranoid fear;” and his propaganda machine spreads this
“xenophobic hysteria and hatred” through the population. “Thus, for the second
time, the illness of one man has become the source of an epidemic of mass
psychosis.”

There is certainly data that support
this argument, that the problem has spread from a Kremlin leader to Russian
society, including recent polls showing that Russians rank Stalin number one as
a leader of all times as places and that nearly half of them think that without
his harsh policies, order couldn’t have been preserved (fedpress.ru/news/77/society/1814748).

But some experts, like Denis Volkov
of the Levada Center, say that “it is impossible to say just what [Russians]
understand” by such statements or whether they are in any way prepared to have
such harsh measures apply to themselves as opposed to individuals and groups
that the state has identified as enemies.

In his
view, the commentator says, “’the Putin effect’ consists in that he is a
politician of a type which most completely corresponds to the mental, political
and psychological needs of Russians, to their views of the world, their tastes,
their so-called ‘mission of Russia,’ and also corresponds to their prejudices,
myths, phobias, and expectations.”

In short,
“Russia is the way it is not because Putin is president … but because the
current generation of Russians needs precisely such a leader.”